


Deny Nothing

by rivkat



Series: Deny Nothing [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Juvenilia, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-12-29
Updated: 1998-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mulder disappears, his two favorite sidekicks must ally to save him. Has Alex Krycek met his match? And is Agent Scully a natural redhead? Only their hairdressers know for sure.  Set after the first film.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deny Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> As Woody Allen said: Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you get between the right man and woman.  
> Disclaimer: You down with OPP, yeah you know me. Actually that's part of the summary, not just the disclaimer.

Alex was in Istanbul, getting a blow job from the most enthusiastic partner he'd yet found on the continent, when he got the alert.

He tossed the kid out and dialed the number -- not the number that appeared on his beeper, naturally, but the number that came up when he ran it through his personalized coding program. Sometimes he wondered what espionage had been like back in the days of Washington and King George. Slower, he thought.

Mulder had been missing for only ten hours by then, but his little partner and his shiny-headed boss had conferred and agreed to conduct an unofficial search for him.

It wouldn't have been news, except that his *real* watchers, the serious ones who could get killed for fucking up, didn't know where he was either. Surveillance hadn't picked up any indication that Scully actually knew his location and they doubted she was trying to game them. She'd been running down the list of Mulder's favorite conspiracy freaks and loons with negative success. All in all, it violated Mulder's standard operating procedure; usually he told Scully something provocative before he ran off, dropping clues like breadcrumbs for little birds to eat. Usually Mulder had called by this point, when the shit was a millisecond away from the fan blades and he expected her to fix it all.

He wondered if Mulder had finally lost his vertical hold. It had always been a possibility that one day he'd decide to stop fighting and embrace the darkness behind his own skull. That was part of his charm.

Alex sighed. No doubt about it, he missed the big galoot. And the local Turks, while young, were nowhere near as good-looking.

He was on the next plane to New York.

****

The light in Mulder's apartment was murkier than the water of the aquarium humming dimly in the corner. Small surprise that Mulder would take better care of his fish than of himself, though neither would win any health awards.

Scully would have been here already. He thought it looked a little tidier than he remembered. He wondered if she kept clothes here, or if that was too indiscreet. Surveillance refused to confirm a sexual relationship. Of course, he'd had a pet hacker retrieve his own file from Surveillance and they'd thought that he and Mulder were just friends. All it took was some paranoid lust and a willingness -- in his case, an eagerness -- to forego beds.

The ostentatious sound of a safety being flicked off interrupted his musings. The gun nudged the back of his neck and, as always, it sent a thrill straight to his cock.

"Hands behind your back," Scully ordered. He smiled at the fishtank because she couldn't see it and swung the prosthesis back and caught it with his remaining hand.

Cold metal closed around his living wrist, and then he felt the vibration as she secured the prosthesis. Thankfully for him, she didn't seem to notice the unusual texture of his plastic limb.

"Turn around."

She'd kept the weight off well, he noted as he looked down at her. He'd expected a continuing fluctuation, based on his memories of her when he'd first met Mulder and when she was returned. But it seemed that Dana Scully was no yo-yo dieter.

"What are you doing here?"

"Looking for my KISS records that Mulder borrowed. Does he know you wear his shirts when he's gone?"

She flushed and her eyes dropped for a crucial second. One sharp tug at just the right angle, and the straps around his shoulder slipped free of the prosthesis. He swung his arm around, a bizarrely improvised numchuk, and batted her gun hand aside just as his plastic fist connected with the sweet spot on the back of her head.

The Addams Family's Thing couldn't have done better, he thought with satisfaction as she crumpled. He fished a handcuff key from his pocket. He had to stick it between his teeth to unlock the cuff from his wrist, but then he was able to remove it from the prosthesis and reinstall the cuffs on her.

It was the first time that getting his arm cut off had ever helped with anything.

She regained consciousness as he was unbuttoning his shirt to slide the prosthesis back into place. He could tell she was watching, because her breathing changed even though she tried to keep her eyes at half-mast.

"I'm not going to rape you," he said indulgently. "I've just got to get my secret weapon back in its holster."

She struggled upright. With her arms cuffed behind her, she had to thrust her chest against Mulder's Egyptian cotton shirt. He stared as he tossed his shirt aside, just to annoy her. He supposed that it was a nice body, for a girl.

"What are you doing here?"

"I didn't answer that when you *had* the gun. But I imagine that the answer's obvious, Agent Scully." He secured the prosthesis, tightening the straps that had torn loose, and began the laborious process of putting his shirt back on. The major life activities weren't so bad -- eating, fucking, firing a gun -- but details of hygiene were still frustrating. He probably wouldn't notice the difficulty after another forty years to get used to it.

"Am I to assume that you don't know where he is either?"

"None of the factions I know of will admit to having anything to do with his disappearance. I thought I'd see if I could be of some help, since you're not known for your ability to think outside the box."

"Do you have any useful suggestions, Krycek?"

Most of what came to mind had very little to do with finding Mulder. It was admirable, in a way, that she was able to ignore the fact that she was sitting handcuffed on the floor in the presence of a man she knew to be a remorseless killer. "When did you last hear from him?"

Her eyes began to roll, and then she denied herself the indulgence of reacting. "He said something about a potential new case a few days ago, I'm sure it's on tape somewhere. According to garage records, he left the Hoover building at 10:12 AM two days ago and departed for parts unknown. I had hopes that someone like you might have access to the tracking device that I'm sure was in his official vehicle."

He smirked at her. "Shall we go to the location of its most recent transmission?"

"You want to ... work together?"

"I'm not going to kill you, Agent Scully, and we might have better luck combining our official and unofficial resources. We get Mulder back, and then I'll fight you for his hand."

Her lips quirked. "It seems as if you could use one."

Alex didn't even wince; as soon as he'd said it he'd known that he'd pitched it straight over the plate. "So, shall we declare a truce until we find the object of our mutual regard?"

She stared at him. He must have passed her test, because she nodded and turned so that the handcuffs faced him.

"I hope you're grateful for a watchful government's tender concern for Mulder's well-being," he said as he released her.

"I wake up every morning and thank God for that."

He didn't remember such sarcasm. Maybe it was an effect of the abduction.

****

Alex considered making conversation in the car, but since the only question that came to mind was "Are you fucking Mulder?" he considered discretion to be the better part of surviving.

The chop shop was an hour outside of Washington, in a part of Virginia where there were more Confederate flags than working stoplights. Alex surveyed the grimy junkyard with disgust. Usually, Americans' businesses were clean, like their teeth, but this shithole could have come from Russia with love.

He hung back as Scully flashed her badge, pushing back her jacket to make quite sure that the tattooed lout behind the counter got as good a look at her Sig as he'd been getting of her breasts. Judging by the way he straightened up and began to look anywhere but at her, he got the message.

She explained that they were looking for a car, and the man averred that they hadn't received any cars in the last few days. Apparently business was bad.

"Sir, do you understand that it is a federal offense to convert federal property to private use?"

"We don't have any fed'ral vehicles," the good old boy insisted.

"Sir, have you heard of the 'Lo-Jack'?"

He nodded, licking his lips. Alex noted that, despite the meat-locker air conditioning, the man's Harley Davidson T-shirt was ringed with sweat.

"Are you aware that the missing federal vehicle had similar tracking technology and that we have received a transmission from this location indicating the presence of the vehicle?"

The man didn't know whether to nod or shake his head, complex sentences not being his strong suit, so he just swallowed, his eyes widening and bulging under the dirty fluorescent lights. "Uh, maybe I --"

"Sir," Scully cut him off, sounding bored. "I will make this simple. I want that vehicle, in however many parts it now exists. If you give me the access I need without further argument, you and I are done. If I have to call for a warrant, I will invoke the state and federal forfeiture laws and clean this place out down to the junkyard dogs."

Alex repressed the urge to clap, because it would be very Zen without his left arm. Gorilla boy wiped a sweaty hand over his forehead. "Fuh-follow me."

"You know," he whispered to Scully as they trotted after the agitated man, "it's feds like you who cause these nasty rumors about unmarked helicopters and martial law."

Her lips thinned and she strode ahead of him, short legs working overtime. He grinned at her back. She had more buttons than a space shuttle. Maybe that's why Mulder was willing to put up with everything else, just for the fun of pushing them.

The car was mostly intact, raised on a lift so that it could be more efficiently dismantled. "Get up there and look around," Scully ordered him. "He probably got out of the car voluntarily, but there might be a gas receipt that would help."

Alex grunted and used his arm to lever himself into the driver's seat. He wished she'd watch his one-armed prowess, but she was off scaring the bejeezus out of the Asian mechanic cowering in the darkened recesses of the garage.

He checked the glove compartment, but there was nothing but the manual. No surprise. Mulderleavings wouldn't be neatly hidden away.

The space under the seats was much more productive. The dead leaves and cigarette butts had to be from previous drivers, but there was a McDonald's bag that still smelled of burgers and salt. Alex poked through the greasy wrappers until he found the receipt. Some of the purple ink had run. He could tell that Mulder had spent $10.44 -- what an amazing pig the man could be -- but the store number was only halfway visible. Still, with a few phone calls it would be a good lead.

Scully came back around to the door of the car and looked up at him expectantly. "Mulder thought he deserved a break that day." He showed her the receipt. "It should help pin down his location." Getting into the car was one thing, but how was he going to get down without falling on his ass? He dangled his legs over the side and prepared to jump.

Wordlessly, Scully moved so that her shoulder was in exactly the right position. He grabbed at the soft fabric of her jacket and managed to remain upright as he landed, though his shins ached.

"The car was brought in by a friend of Mr. Kim's, there," she informed him as he let go of her. "Mr. Kim does not want any trouble with the INS and he was quite helpful. His friend got the car when it was dropped off in front of the friend's store. According to Mr. Kim, everyone in the Korean community knows that his friend works in the 'used car business'."

****

Scully got on the phone and began to harass hapless low-level executives to find the source of the McDonald's receipt. Corporate HQ was forthcoming once they knew that there was no investigation into beef quality going on, just an attempt to trace a missing agent.

The McDonald's was on Georgia Avenue, just at the edge of the District. They drove there without talking.

What could Mulder have been looking for?

Ever since the events of the past summer, Mulder had been unable to get official approval for X-Filish investigations. He'd been doing domestic terrorism, because sometimes he could zoo up some conspiracy connection to wackos who were stockpiling Uzis because they saw black helicopters on the telephone lines where normal people only saw ravens. Alex had heard that Skinner had called in ten years of favors to keep Mulder out of ISU and to continue his field assignment status with Scully.

"Was there anything about a case in this part of town?" he asked Scully as she returned to the car. He already felt the frustration of a dying lead.

"The manager checked with the girl who filled his order," she said instead of replying. "She says he was buying lunch for himself and a kid." So Mulder wasn't quite as greedy a hog as he'd thought.

"Description?"

She fastened her seatbelt and started the car. "Asian, she said. She wasn't a good witness. I suspect she thinks 'they all look alike'. But the good news is that he was wearing a uniform from the Catholic school a few blocks away."

"I never saw Mulder as a chicken hawk," Alex said and she was actually so shocked that she gasped. If she hadn't been belted in she probably would have pistol-whipped him, but instead her hands twitched on the steering wheel. "Are you angry because he might be a pedophile or just because he might be cheating on you?"

The car jerked into reverse and to the side, throwing him against the car door so that his good shoulder ached. He could see her face tighten against the vitriol that wanted to spew from her like plague blisters bursting. Maybe she just couldn't think up a good enough comeback.

She drove the way he always thought insecure men did -- aggressively, using the gas and brake pedals liberally and sometimes without appearing to distinguish between the two. Another datum for the profile. "So, when did you and Mulder finally do the deed?" he asked as they prowled down the block, looking for the school.

"What deed is that?"

"Coy isn't your best look, Agent Scully."

Her lips thinned, a rosebud crushed under a jackboot's heel. "Did you know that you babbled in Russian when you were having sex with him? He asked me what some of it meant."

He should know better than to play with her. She might not have Mulder's psychology degree, but something had surely rubbed off. One way or another. If he didn't hit back now, the power dynamic would be all wrong for the rest of this investigation. "Why would he ask you? Does he kiss and tell?"

"He thinks I know everything." He saw the school, next to a small church, and Scully noticed it as well. She turned onto the cross street and pulled into the school parking lot.

Okay, he could accept that answer for now. Scully parked in a spot marked "Reserved for Sisters" and they got out. Schoolchildren rushed past them like a flock of sheep chased by the homework wolves -- school was just getting out.

****

Scully went strangely passive on him as soon as they got in the school. Alex would have thought that the child-size universe suited her, but she looked around the place as if she were a wayward child brought in for correction. Mulder had mentioned that she was Catholic; perhaps she was flashing back to the transgressions of her youth, back when guilt was a stunning prime- time discovery instead of syndicated and in reruns.

For whatever reason, he had to take the initiative and flash his fake badge at the two nuns in the front office. He smiled at them and they smiled back. Nuns liked law and order, and he'd been told more than once that he had the face of a choirboy. Usually by a Catholic man with priest issues.

Remembering, he grinned at the nuns as they waited for the headmistress. He could tell that his excessive happiness made them a little nervous, but they smiled back even as their eyes lost the hang of it. Scully didn't seem to notice his mindgames; she sat in her plastic bucket chair with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes focused somewhere in the next hemisphere.

He mouthed a thank-you to the nuns as the door to the headmistress's office swung open and a high, tiny voice asked the agents to come in, please. It wasn't very nice to freak nuns out. Doubtless they were mostly nice women who prayed for fags like him to repent, though certainly there had to be a few who'd rather he just burn in hell. They probably fantasized about the sex, or the torments of hell (assuming that they saw a distinction) as they counted their rosaries.

A cup of coffee and three yearbooks later, they'd extracted a list of all the school's Asian boys from the sister-headmistress. She seemed more concerned that one of their students would have lunch with a strange man, even one who said he was a policeman, than over the fact that said man was missing. He understood her reasoning. You take care of your own, and fuck the collateral damage.

And there was a boy who had not been to school in three days, since Mulder had come looking.

His mother worked in a grocery store, but his father worked for an import/export business. That had definite skullduggery potential. Scully extracted the boy's home address from Sister Mary and promised that they'd file a missing persons report if it seemed indicated. The Sister thought that the parents were unlikely to trust the government enough to go to the police, unassisted, even if their son was missing.

They were driving to the Silver Spring address the nun had given them when Scully's cellphone went off like a car alarm.

"Scully."

Skinner's voice through the phone made him sound like an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon. It made sense, as Scully was the little red-headed girl. And Mulder, the hapless Charlie, eternal loser but also the protagonist of every adventure. They made sense, but who was he? Snoopy, maybe, living in Charlie's doghouse, with his front paw snipped off by the Zamboni.

Scully visibly lost patience with what she was hearing and interrupted Skinner mid-noise. "Sir, I think that's --" Her mouth snapped shut and he thought he could hear the bones in her jaw jolt. But her submission didn't last long. "No, sir, I cannot agree -- No, sir, in my best judgment -- And do you have any idea where those orders -- No, I will not ... Very well then ... Thank you, sir," and surprisingly, the last words didn't sound forced at all. She sounded almost relieved.

"Care to share with the class, Scully?"

"Skinner's received orders to let this go. He's officially granted me a week of personal leave but will confirm that I'm acting under the FBI aegis while I continue the investigation."

"Nice guy."

She looked at him curiously, as if uncertain whether to take the statement at face value. "Can you get money? Skinner thinks I should keep away from my apartment and my credit cards since there are indications of government involvement here."

"No problem."

Robert Park and his parents lived in a nondescript apartment building. They rode the elevator up in silence. Alex wondered if agents ended up sleeping with their partners just because there was nothing better to do. Without a script like the folks on 'Homicide' it was hard to figure out what to say during the long waits that were part of any investigator's life. Come to think of it, he knew a few assassin pairs that were like that, too. Indifference was almost impossible to maintain when you and your partner were tossed rapidly from utter boredom to ineffable terror at random intervals. After too many adrenalin jolts, it was either sweaty sex or bloody murder.

They found the apartment and Alex pounded on the door. From eight stories up, it would be difficult for someone to sneak out the window. After thirty seconds, he turned to Scully. "Do you need to look away while I break in?"

"Don't you like to be watched?"

His mouth dropped open for just a second, and then he reached in his pocket for his lock gun. The door opened like a college freshman after six beers, and they were in.

It was immediately clear that the place had been abandoned. The air had the dusty stillness of flight, and an overstuffed suitcase that had obviously been overlooked in the rush sat on the couch. There were a few spots on the wall where pictures should have been.

"Check the trash for anything they tried to get rid of," Scully ordered, pushing past him. She went over to the small desk under the window and began to pull out drawers. He saw flashes of Korean and she began stacking documents to take away. It could be letters from home, but that was a job for the translators.

Scully was as efficient as an Uzi plowing through bystanders; she'd tossed the desk in the time it took him to sort through souring kimchee and empty boxes of cornflakes. They did the bedroom together, Alex pawing through the clothes and Scully checking the bedframe and other classic hiding places. There was nothing there, and nothing in the toilet tank or the light fixtures either. He was again surprised that she knew exactly where to look. He'd always assumed, from what Mulder said, that Scully was above the unsavory, both in her own life and when examining others'. It was beginning to look like that was just another of Mulder's delusions.

In the child's bedroom, taped under the closet shelf, he found another Korean document. Scully seemed distracted by the stuffed animals and she rearranged them while he checked for anything else.

"Can you get these translated?" he asked when he was finished.

She nodded vaguely, eyes so large and vulnerable that she could be the subject of one of those cheap hotel-room paintings of innocent orphans.

Kids, he thought. Something about kids. She did not need -- Mulder did not need -- her distraction.

"What are we going to get it done now that you've lost Papa Hoover's blessing?"

"Langley," she said and smiled.

End 1/6

Deny Nothing, 2/6 RivkaT@aol.com

It was a good thing Scully meant Mulder's freak friend Langly and not the CIA as he'd initially thought, inasmuch as Alex had even more reason to stay away from that part of Virginia than he did from the FBI.

Langly and the other Stooges gaped like sucking chest wounds when they saw him. He doubted that Mulder had admitted the sexual aspect of the affair -- he was probably afraid that one or more of them would proposition him if they knew he was a two-way street -- but they sure as hell knew about the betrayal.

It seemed appropriate that Langly had been an Asian studies major in college.

He quickly determined that one of the papers from the desk was mostly transliteration, phonetic characters describing English words, and strange ones at that.

Threatening laughter. Glorious sunset. Ghostly whispers. Cosmic pratfall. And, incongruous even before it had been circled in thick black ink, Pop rocks.

It was like haiku, almost. But more like something else, something he couldn't quite place.

"Weapons," Scully said when Langly finished reading. "These are the code names for weapons projects."

"*American* weapons projects," Byers breathed, his brown eyes wide. Alex had never been into hairy men, but there was something about Byers's beard that indicated a charming precision.

"Arms dealers looking to steal and sell the latest technology?" Frohike asked Scully, as if she'd know.

She tapped her fingers on the desk next to the sheet. "It's possible, under the cover of an import/export business. Can you find out what these projects are? Particularly Pop Rocks."

The Gunmen traded significant glances, which was a laborious process as there were three of them to coordinate. Finally, Frohike looked back at Scully and nodded. "But you have to leave," he said. "Come back in ... three hours and we'll have something for you."

Scully didn't seem put out, and Alex could understand why they'd want to preserve a little mystery. It's not like she'd come visit them for the beefcake potential. "Why don't we go hang with my friends, Dana?" he asked and got a full house of glares for his trouble.

Alex took her to a gun shop he knew, where they let him in after closing time, took his money, and didn't make any noise about waiting periods. Mostly he just browsed, but when their time was almost up he thought about it and bought her two guns that she could leave behind if the rescue got messy and not worry about being traced. She didn't protest, though she looked longingly at the line of concealed carry cocktail purses behind one counter.

They left the store, finally, and he handed her the guns. She put her Bureau- issue weapon in the trunk of the car, under the spare tire, and looked up at him. "Next time," she said, "I'm buying."

****

When they returned to the Gunmen's grassy knoll, Byers had acquired the confidential weapons reports and Langly had finished the translations. He told them that most of the other papers had been, so far as he could tell, completely innocuous. But the list from the kid's closet was suggestive. It was a list of addresses with dates and numbers attached.

"They're moving something through the DC area," Langly commented. Scully nodded, a molten copper strand of hair escaping from behind her ear to swing gently with her motion.

She tapped her pen against her bottom lip, a researcher's habit. "But the dates -- there's no fixed pattern. And the last one's over three months ago." He watched as she sucked the very tip of the cap into her mouth and bit down. Very Freudian, classic sexual frustration signal. Mulder would have made some joke.

Mulder would have had her on her knees in front of him.

Scully destroyed the incipient fantasy by speaking. "The fact that Mr. Park and family were here until a few days ago suggests that they hadn't finished up...whatever it was. This could be an out of date manifest."

"Like last week's TV Guide," Alex suggested, and received another serving of nasty looks. He was reminded strongly of the Wizard of Oz. Scully could put on a pinafore and braid her hair in pigtails. Langly could be the Tin Man, Frohike the Cowardly Lion, and Byers the Scarecrow.

That would make him Glinda the Good Witch. He smiled to himself. You can take the gay man out of the piano bar ...

"We'll just have to go to these places and see if there's anything left," Scully decided. Then she yawned. If she'd been sleeping like Alex, she wouldn't have been sleeping at all.

"When's the last time you slept?" Byers asked her, and she shook her head which was an answer in itself. Byers walked to where she was sitting and put his hand on her shoulder. "You can't be any help to him in this condition. Why don't we check out the places on this list, just some initial reconnaissance, and see what we can find out. You get some sleep and in the morning you can follow up on what we've learned."

Scully's face was as stiff with stubbornness, but the other two were nodding at her. "There's no point in barging ahead without sufficient information," Frohike agreed. "If you go wandering around in the middle of the night you may well tip them off that we're on their trail."

Alex had to concur. "It's nearly one now," he pointed out. "A few hours of sleep will be a lot of help, especially if you guys can narrow down the list of locations."

Though Scully's spine was still as straight as a demonstration skeleton's, Alex could sense her acquiescence.

"Um, Dr. Scully, we'd be happy to have you stay here," Frohike began hesitantly, stretching his hand out towards her, "but, I don't think we have room for ... him."

Alex bared his teeth at the little man. "I'm easy to accommodate."

Scully sighed and got to her feet. "No, I don't want you out of my sight, Krycek. We'll lay low, I'll call you in the morning," she told the boyz, and then she was moving out the door, assuming that he'd tag along.

Maybe it was Toto after all, he realized as he lurched to his feet and hurried after her.

****

They ended up in a Motel Six not far from the DC border.

Scully produced a garment bag from the back of her car. He was impressed, but then he realized that she had to be used to life on the run with Mulder. Running away, running towards, just running, these were Mulder's main solo activities, and also one of his favorite team sports.

Alex went for dinner and called his DC contact just to check in. Ashley was as bitchy as ever, which he found reassuring even though it was probably just a ploy. People in his world didn't need a reason to play head games; they just did. Like any mid-level office worker, Ashley felt more allegiance to him, a fellow observer of the bosses' foibles, than to said bosses. She'd let him know that Mulder was missing, and she'd help him up to the point that betraying him would do her more good. However, since his indiscretions weren't limited to stealing office supplies, that point might come quickly. He'd only use her help if he couldn't avoid it.

Scully had steamed the next day's suit and hung it in the coffin-sized closet, and now she was sitting on the bed nearest the door, reading reports. He'd finished his Burger King meal half an hour ago -- American fast food, nothing else like it -- and he was bored. He was trying to understand the specs the Gunmen had given them, but all he could really tell was that the U.S. military was interested in making bigger and better booms.

"What am I going to tell Skinner about you?" Scully wondered out loud, saving him from the death of a thousand paper cuts.

"That you charged ahead without backup, a rogue avenging angel."

"Better than hooking up with his favorite traitor."

"Am I really his favorite?" He blinked seductively at her and she looked away. That was in the nature of a victory. It showed that if she looked at him, she'd have to give him a smile or a frown, whichever she begrudged more.

"Did you really stay all night on his balcony?"

"I'll tell if you will."

"I don't think he knows any other traitors."

"That's not what I meant."

She failed to return the volley, instead swiveling back to her laptop. He couldn't believe that she was recording her investigation notes. Mulder was missing and she was *typing*. The woman had liquid nitrogen in her veins.

God -- he remembered her as this short, dumpy nonentity. No matter what she wore, it always looked like tweed on her. He'd been unable to comprehend what Mulder saw in her -- though he was grateful that Mulder didn't care about snappy dressing.

Somewhere among the abduction, the deaths, the cancer and the implant, the old Dana Scully had been whittled away. Now there was nothing left but the heartwood.

She was as exquisite as a samurai's sword. He had no doubt that she could slice him up into precise one-inch cubes with her laser eyes and her pragmatically short fingernails. Had Mulder always seen the possibility in her? He'd had the most outrageous intuitions, but they were so often right.

"What?" She looked up from the tape-bound report, annoyed at his surveillance.

"You're beautiful."

She shook her head. "Keep reading. We don't have much time."

"I don't understand any of this," he had to admit.

"Let me look," she demanded. "What's the difficulty?" She flipped through the pages of diagrams. "Oh."

"What does *that* mean?" he asked, annoyed.

"It *is* rocket science," she said and he had the feeling that she would have graced him with a superior half-smirk if he'd been the right man. Then she settled back against the headboard to begin her lecture. "This report on Project Pop Rocks concerns several items of advanced satellite technology. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been working on mini-satellites, known as lightsats, since the mid-80s. I had understood that the project died, but I've seen a number of government zombies over the past few years.

"Most satellites require large launch facilities like Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. But lightsats can launch from trucks on the highway. In case of war, antisatellite weapons could take out our existing communications and intelligence satellites and then a handful of missiles would prevent us from launching replacements from our fixed sites. With lightsats we could put up satellites faster than they could be taken out."

He needed more. "Don't we have enough birds in the air now? I know I've seen captures of your license plate far too many times."

She adjusted her glasses and dropped her voice further into lecture mode. "Lightsats probably aren't that useful to the American miltary, or whatever agency you've been betraying lately. But they'd be very useful to nations or groups without access to major launch facilities. With lightsats a terrorist nation could get a small, cheap satellite to do a specific job, perhaps short- term surveillance of a particular target, and pop it up from a road or an airport runway. They could even launch antisatellite weapons that way and cripple our ability to communicate and gather intelligence at a critical juncture."

Alex found himself staring at her mouth. It was like getting a strategic intelligence report from 1-900-HOT-CHIX. A woman with such casual mastery of the complex and arcane might bring similar intensity and comprehensive knowledge to more intimate matters.

How could anyone look at that milky skin, smooth as a mountain lake at midnight, and not want to mark it? He wanted to run his hand across her porcelain cheek, to see the blood rise to the surface -- and perhaps beyond.

He sat on the edge of the bed. Scully was sitting in the center, flanked by pillows, her back stiff against the cheap pressed-wood headboard. She paid him no attention as the mattress sagged dumbly beneath them. She was turning pages of the report on Pop Rocks, wetting the fleshy ball of her thumb with a catlike flick of her tongue as she turned each page.

It seemed inconceivable that this woman should be wasted on bad beds in cheap motels. On Mulder.

Of course it was also inconceivable that she should have been abducted, her reproductive system raped and destroyed like a Vietnamese village overrun by GIs.

Appearances can be deceiving, he thought, and finally touched her face, right at the jawline where her skull threatened to saw through its thin cover of flesh. Up close, her skin was like a parchment lampshade, dimming the light inside so that it was possible to look directly at her. The fine soft hairs on her cheek were distinctly feminine, unlike the rougher testosterone- fueled stubble of his usual partners.

She was hot, he realized, hot and dry like sunlight in Arizona, like the heat from the old radiator in his pathetic Moscow apartment on the days when it was miraculously, blessedly working. Hot, and shocking like static electricity. He pulled his hand away and almost saw the purple afterimage of the lightnings that danced from her skin to his.

Her indrawn breath was almost lost in the rustling as the DoD report dropped to the bed.

He knew that she wouldn't shoot him; she'd already made that decision and she hated to second-guess herself. Instead, her mouth parted fractionally and she tilted her head back, just a degree. It was a good thing he was a veteran of international politics, because interpreting her signals was like analyzing 1970s Russian politics from the headlines in Pravda. He braced his hand on the bed and moved in to her, wondering at the perversities of human nature, the way that the straying daughter always seeks out the stern father. Did she despise Mulder for his occasional tenderness, he wondered as his mouth touched the molten steel of her lips.

As nimble as he'd become with his lopsided frame, one-handed sex really only worked as a solo endeavor. He lay on top of her, kissing her and bearing her down into the bed, tugging at her shirt but unable to get access to the burning brand of her body. Helpless, he rocked against her as she shoved the report off the bed and stung his mouth with her kisses.

She pushed and suddenly he was on his side, the mattress pressing the prosthesis into his chest. She pulled at his shirt and he was finally able to touch the curve of her breast, a handful of sun. She twisted further, pushing herself into his grasping hand, and then he was underneath her.

His shirt, her shirt, her doctor's hands served her admirably well. She was doing all the work and he found himself simultaneously gratified and disgruntled. Was he just a vibrator with three extra limbs? He stretched his neck to bite at her shoulder and she made a low sound in her throat, grinding her hips against his erection.

He didn't want to let go of her breast. Her nipple was cooler than the soft flesh around it, stiff and puckered against his calloused fingertips. For courtesy's sake he shifted his hand to give her other breast equal time.

He'd never slept with Mulder after he killed Melissa Scully. He wondered if Scully knew that, what she'd say if he said it now. Fortunately for both of them, his mouth was full of her skin, hot and slick and salty-peach as he sucked at the flesh of her neck. She'd be marked; she'd have to explain herself to Mulder. Or Mulder would have to slap an explanation out of her like he always tried to do with Alex himself.

The air was cold against his suddenly exposed buttocks, and she was not particularly gentle as she pushed his pants and boxers as far down his legs as she could reach. He obliged her by kicking them the rest of the way off as he renewed the assault on her chest, driving his mouth between her breasts and pushing his hipbone into her pelvis. She was so little, so female, that it was possible and he certainly didn't need to worry about accidentally crushing her balls. In her case, they were entirely metaphorical.

When he'd teased her breasts enough that her head was thrown back into the pillows and she was panting, not ordering him around, he moved down into the softness of her stomach. Her skirt was easy enough to figure out and he made her naked so that he could put his face between her thighs.

He'd had sex with women, of course. Even if you crossed Marita off of the list -- and you might, if you knew everything about her -- there'd been others of the female persuasion. So the thin salty taste of her was no real surprise.

He was surprised by how much it turned him on. He hadn't known that the cool Mrs. Spooky could make those sounds, writhe that liquidly against him, crush his head between her warm soft thighs like a velvet-coated nutcracker. He rubbed his face against her, coating himself in the warpaint of her sex, and breathed her in as she came.

She was still shuddering when he pulled himself up her body and slid into her, further foreplay impossible. With only one arm he couldn't brace himself the way he was used to so he pinned her upper body down with the weight of his own and let his hips do all the moving. In and out, dancing with her on the dingy bedspread, her breath moist at his collarbone, panting like bloodhounds in the forest chasing after a suspect. But he was the criminal, he was on the run and she drew her legs up, tucking her knees under him. Her hand was between them, still looking for her own pleasure, and Alex admired the singlemindedness of her greed. He was moving like the second hand on a grandfather clock, the swinging swaying hypnotizing him, sucking him in entirely to be consumed.

The orgasm hit him like a shotgun blast, assaulting every part of his body with hot pellets, and he collapsed onto her even as his hips continued their useless thrusting.

He assumed that she came as well, because she didn't complain.

He rolled over and stared at the ceiling, as pockmarked as the face of the teenager who'd served him breakfast at McDonald's that morning.

Scully pressed her nose into his chest and he shivered. Her half-smile crackled against his skin like a stun gun.

"I just made that up, about you speaking Russian when you came," she said. He twitched in surprise and she nipped at his chest with her teeth.

"Are you sleeping with him?"

"I'm *awake*," she pointed out grumpily and scooted away from him. "Don't you know the answer from the constant surveillance we're under?"

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

He should let the scab alone. His curiosity only encouraged her to enhance the mystery. He was sure of the answer anyway.

Mulder had liked to watch het porn before -- sometimes during -- sex. He said he liked being reminded of his options. Alex had tried several varieties of responses: hurt ("Aren't I good enough?"), braggadocio ("They're not as good as I am, baby"), suggestiveness ("Then why don't you invite one of your female colleagues over?"). For the last, Alex had meant to specify Scully, but the madman in Mulder's body had looked incipiently homicidal and he went generic at the last second.

Alex imagined Mulder's reaction to this latest development. Would he have paid to watch it? Or would it have been one of the things he had to be forced to like? Alex could see him, tied down onto a cheap hotel chair and handcuffed to the radiator, watching and cursing as Alex fucked Scully and she loved it. Mulder would be so angry that he'd probably spit when Alex came to unzip his pants but his erection would be as blind and solid as ever.

He fell asleep to the memory of Mulder's satiated eyes on the flickering television screen, watching inflatable plastic people screw.

End 2/6

Deny Nothing, 3/6 RivkaT@aol.com

She was showered, flossed, and dressed in her blue suit by the time he got back from his breakfast run. Alex gave her the donut and the coffee and she thanked him politely.

"We need to figure out where they might have taken him," he pointed out as she sipped and reviewed the Gunmen's revised list, faxed to her computer minutes before. They'd pulled ownership records, noted what kind of storage space was available in each place, and indicated whether power and phone lines were still active. He had to hope that the list was still somewhat useful. Even covert arms dealers have a hard time finding infinite funds, so it was likely that the sites were still active. Always assuming that Mulder wasn't already dead, executed just to be safely out of the way. Even then, Alex needed to see the body. Mulder had been announced dead more often than disco, and Alex just wasn't willing to trust second-hand reports.

Scully ponted a rounded nail at the middle name on the list. "Let's go there."

"Why?" He knew Scully wasn't the hunch type.

He knew lots of untrue things. She shifted uncomfortably on her feet. "It's, ah, closer than most of the others."

"But not all."

"No, but ... it's a warehouse, not a regular store and it's probably easier to hide ... things ... there."

"Scully."

"What?"

"I'll go along if you admit it's your woman's intuition."

"Get in the car, Krycek."

****

Alex wanted a miner's hat so that his missing arm wouldn't force him to choose between light and weaponry. He'd have to remember to get one. As it was he trod upon Scully's heels, gun aimed into the darkness surrounding them like styrofoam packing. They'd come in through the human-sized door, ignoring the locked loading dock with the stylish gang tags spraypainted across the garage-style doors. The storage room was large, but it felt crowded nonetheless.

Scully swung her flashlight beam into the gloom. He felt rather like Scooby Doo following Velma into the haunted house. Although Scooby was no cripple. And Scully's breasts were -- he heard liquid sloshing and tensed.

"What was that?" she asked in her melted-butter tones.

Somehow 'I don't know' seemed unmanly so he stayed silent.

Her light stretched a glowing finger over flattened cardboard boxes and folding chairs stacked six feet high on pallets. Against one wall of the large storage room he saw a pile of white plastic top hats with red and blue bunding surrounding the crowns. Industrial-size rolls of crepe paper were stacked next to containers filled with sporks.

"What *is* this place?"

"It's a supply depot for the Convention Center," she whispered back. And he hadn't even noticed that he was whispering. "There's something about large groups of conventioneers that destroys all sense of sanity," she waved at the top hats.

A low liquid gurgle came again, behind him this time, like blood being vomited from a drain in a cheap horror film.

Memories of breaking his nails on the door of the missile silo-cum-crypt in North Dakota intruded. His hand tightened on his gun, for all the good it would do. Scully was turning, following the source of the noise through a doorless doorway, further into the dark.

He slipped into the throat-like hallway after her, superstitiously following in her precise footsteps, as if that would protect him from falling through the floor. With two feet, he could imitate her footwork.

Movement ahead, larger than the average warehouse animal. He fired without thinking and saw the spark as the bullet scraped metal. Someone broke into a shuffling blind run as Scully cursed and fired. She swung the light in sweeping zigzags, catching cobwebs that were torn and fluttering from a human passage.

Scully jogged ahead, past more boxes of disposable tablecloths and individually packaged sanitary napkins suitable for bathroom dispensers, towards the back of the building.

No longer watching his feet, he skimmed over concrete rough with wadded paper and sticky with spilled fluids. Scully with her shorter legs was still outpacing him.

The lights flared on, blinding him for a moment. Their unknown companion must have reached a switch. That meant a door -- sure enough, a metallic clang echoed down the hallway.

Then another thunk, this one like a wooden door closing.

Scully charged ahead as he tried to process the two noises. Then he nearly ran into her; she'd stopped as if halted by disc brakes.

There was a door, a wooden one.

But they were separated from it by a toppled metal barrel.

And an oil slick, spreading rapidly from the barrel in thin wormy fingers.

**** "What is that?" Scully asked harshly as she backed away. The oil arrowed towards them, as if it were dripping down a vertical wall.

He swallowed as he retreated. "I hear you spent some time in the Antarctic."

"Yeah." They were backpedaling. The oil crawled up the sides of the walls, gaining slightly.

"You better hope you still have antibodies."

"I was stung --"

His body was dumping so much adrenalin into his bloodstream that he couldn't have manufactured it all himself. There had to be bungee jumpers out there wondering where the thrill had gone. "Same weapon," his voice cracked, "different transmission mechanism. Fire will kill it."

If they couldn't start a fire he'd blow his own head off before it could take over.

Scully's heel caught on a dirt-stiff rag and she fell backwards, into him. He would have raised his hand to help her, but it was full of gun. So he stumbled as well and the oil reached the walls on either side of them. It telescoped towards them, increasing in volume as it lapped at their shoes.

Alex dropped his gun and grabbed Scully's shoulder, dragging her backwards. He had a lighter, if they could get back to all the cardboard boxes. Maybe they could die of smoke inhalation rather than colonization.

He shouldn't have tried to drag her. For a grown woman she was as light as fat-free cream cheese but he didn't have enough balance to do it and he yelped as they both went over.

The invasion was nothing like being taken over by the full alien. That hadn't hurt; like many a parasite it had somehow numbed him. Novocain from the stars.

This was like being strapped into a malfunctioning electric chair. He felt the back of his head slam into the floor as he convulsed and for a moment he thought he'd swallowed his tongue. Worms swirled around and over his hand and swam through the sclera of his eyes.

The pain was galactic. They swarmed in his lungs, in his heart, the large muscles of his thighs, like maggots on a corpse. It hurt like the rotting stump of his arm had hurt before he finally got to a hospital. His fingers twitched against the coiling mass of wormy fluid that would be his deathbed. They were eating his skin from the inside out.

And then he was vomiting black. Slimy wetness was gushing from his eyes and ears into his hair. He was too weak to turn on his side and he nearly choked on his own vomit, sucking down a mouthful that made him gag again.

Through the agony, he managed to tilt his head to spew the thick stringy mess onto the floor. It went on forever, so long that he was able to roll over and get to his knees so that the stuff was no longer coursing down his cheek. When he'd vomited up what had to be his weight in worms, plus whatever was left of dinner and a good chunk of his small intestine, he shook his head to dislodge the worst of the slime and saw Scully.

She was not breathing.

He checked her eyes. The whites were white but he didn't know what that meant. He didn't know how long he'd been out.

"Fuck," he said and dragged himself over her to begin CPR. He tilted her head to try and clear the airway. Was that a pool of alien blackness in her throat? He awkwardly attempted to compress her chest one-handed. None of his training covered monomanual first aid. Usually the victims of the oil breathed: The alien worms, for all their incredible properties, could not eat the dead alive.

He breathed into her mouth. He thought he was supposed to hold her nose closed, but he didn't think that was more important than the chest compression.

Fuck, Scully. You know Mulder will never forgive himself if he's not the one who fails to save you.

As if she'd heard him, her chest hitched and she spewed revolting black gunk into his mouth. He spat as he tilted her over so that she could get rid of it all. It didn't taste any better coming from her, he thought as he rolled his tongue around his mouth, desperately wanting a toothbrush.

For such a little woman, she had an astonishing stomach capacity. She took longer than he did to finish and he began to look around, wondering what happened next. From the reports he'd seen, the oil was unable to survive for long under standard temperature and pressure conditions without a host. The Tunguska rock seemed to have mineral anomalies that protected it, but he sincerely hoped that the warehouse walls were not similarly equipped.

Best to torch the place anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Scully stopped heaving and fell onto her back, her vomit-spattered chest rising and falling irregularly.

There was a lot of oil on the floor around them. It didn't seem to be going anywhere. If they were lucky, whatever in them that had killed their invaders had gone on to infect the remaining oil when their bodies expelled the alien substance.

Which raised the fascinating question -- why were they alive? He wouldn't have wasted his time on contemplation if movement were a present possibility, but as it was thinking couldn't hurt. Scully was easy to explain, she'd had the cure only a few months ago and the antibodies must still be strong. But his own life was a puzzlement.

He tested his legs. Shaky, but functional. Scully still wasn't moving. And women were supposed to have more stamina.

Maybe the full alien who'd taken him over had turned him into some sort of alien-oil-virus allergen. Which only made the loss of his arm even more ironic. Even if the deluded cripples in the forest had been right about his status as potential test victim, even if they'd been right about the ludicrous idea that one could only test a vaccine using the left arm, even then it would have been unnecessary.

Self-pity terminated when he smelled the smoke. Someone had beaten him to the match.

His legs were barely stable enough to support himself, even minus a twenty- pound limb. No way he could carry Scully out.

"Scully," he ordered. He sounded as hoarse as a sailor on the last day of a three-day pass. "Wakey-wakey, Scully."

He looked at her more carefully. Under the remains of the sick on her face her skin was swollen and tight. Her breath was uneven and labored. Allergic reaction, maybe.

"Scully, get up now. Do you know what that shit's doing to your hair?" Not even a flicker.

He braced his hand on his knee for a moment and panted, gathering strength. The sharp tang of burning wood filled his nostrils as he inhaled, increasing his determination. There was no way he could sling her over his shoulder. Drag her? Possible.

Alex stumbled to the door through which the unidentified but definitely malicious person had gone. It was, as he'd expected, hot to the touch. They'd have to go back the other way.

His mental mail icon sent up a flag. Loping past Scully's unconscious form, he returned to the larger room they'd examined before.

There was no time for finesse. Using reserves of strength he'd thought only available for self-preservation, he pushed a stack of chairs off of a pallet, sending a thousand pounds of grey folding metal to the floor. The wheeled structure beneath was contoured specifically to move chairs, so he grabbed one from the disaster he'd created and put it back on, forming a mock wheelchair.

Skidding over the rough floor, he returned to the hallway. Smoke was visible, scudding upwards. Scully, prone on the floor, had probably not yet been affected.

Alex slid the pallet through the smelly muck that had been an alien weapon and dragged Scully's live weight into the chair. He had trouble turning the chair around and keeping it straight on the uneven floor. They ought to make surviving Conspiracy schemes an Olympic event, like the triathalon. He'd be a fucking gold medalist, that's for sure.

His resolve to move swiftly was buttressed by the line of flame that shot from the closed door behind them across the ceiling, overhead. As he pushed, he heard a pop over the hiss of flames and the lights went out. Now they were back to darkness, albeit fire-lit, and a gentle rain of flaming paint chips began to drift down onto the stacks of boxes around them.

They were through the doorway only a few seconds behind the fire. His arm against the wheeled pallet was shaking. "I could really use some help here," he told Scully, perversely glad that she couldn't hear the nervousness in his voice. The too-small wheels skittered and jolted over the floor, screeching as he collided with something metal. She slumped and her hand dragged against the concrete floor.

At the main doors now, he let go of Scully's transportation and turned the doorknob. The lock disengaged, but the door would not budge. Something must have been dragged against it. He thought that his arm had stopped shaking as he leant against the immobile door, then realized that his entire body was trembling with his hand.

The fire was chasing them with unmistakable intent. In the back of the room, rolls of crepe paper flamed like mock stars. There was no fire alarm and the sprinklers overhead remained as dry as California in August. This was definitely an expendable site. Easy come, easy go up in smoke.

There was one last chance.

The garage door was secured by thick chains looped through iron eyes in the floor. But there was a lock.

Alex bent down and retrieved his spare gun. He almost couldn't stand again but they were going to die and Mulder was going to die and he was standing. The smoke was th

ening, the stench of burnt plastic in the air. He was doubtless breathing toxins whose names and deadliness Scully could recite in her sleep.

He took aim, wishing he hadn't dropped his main weapon with its larger caliber, and fired. Metal spanged and twisted, and he approached the lock and kicked at it. A segment fell away.

Damn, you the man, Alexei.

He laboriously reholstered the gun and unthreaded the chain. Then he grabbed the metal handle of the garage door, feeling it bite deep into his hand, and pulled, putting his thighs into it, willing heretofore unrevealed Incredible Hulk powers to manifest in this hour of need.

He'd seduced men in less time than it took the door to part company with the floor. The heavy metal inched upwards as Alex began to feel the heat at his back. Something on the floor, maybe real spilled oil, had caught and he could see a garden of flame in his peripheral vision.

Eighteen inches, good enough for government work. He staggered back to Scully, who was beginning to choke again. Her cheeks were swollen and even her hands seemed larger than before.

He tilted her out of the chair -- she'd never know where the bruises came from -- and draggered her by one arm like a child with a favorite teddy bear. Her hair was black and her skin streaked brown. Her renewed heaves produced nothing but saliva.

His legs gave out mere feet from the door. He should have been able to crawl there. Hell, he *should* have been able to roll, or undulate like an inchworm. But the adrenalin had been too generous for too long. His muscles wouldn't respond.

"Scully!"

Her breath hitched and he could see that she was drooling.

"Scully, I can't do this. You've got to wake up, get us out of here." He was begging for his life, something he'd sworn never to do. How terribly embarrassing that Dana Scully was the recipient of his plea.

"Scully, wake up. I need you. Mulder needs you."

She whined deep in her throat.

"C'mon, Scully, come back to me. D'you really think Mulder wants you to die in a fire? How would he feel about that?"

She growled and then her eyes popped open. "Wha--?"

"You've got to get us out," he repeated and she twisted her head, obviously trying to figure out why she was on the ground and what was happening and why the world smelled like a barbecue gone wrong. She made a confused mewling sound and pushed herself shakily off the floor into a kneeling position. "You go first," he indicated the gap between concrete and metal with his eyes, "and pull me through."

Scully nodded. Breathing carefully, bracing herself on swollen hands, she lowered herself back to the ground and began to push her feet through into the cool night air.

He desperately hoped that whoever set the fire had left the scene. Scully's ass was not large, but it would still make an easy target.

Most of her body was outside now.

She could just leave him. Nobody would ever know. If Mulder asked she could always say she tried to save him.

Her head disappeared as she twisted to look around. This was his kind of trick, not hers. She'd grab him. Or else he'd survive and come back to throttle her; Mulder hated him anyway and he should have gotten the job right the first time because they wouldn't be here now if he had managed to splatter the right set of brains over her apartment floor.

Scully's hand thrust back into the burning building like the Lady in the Lake reaching for Arthur. He grabbed on with all his inconsiderable strength and tried to help push himself along the floor with his feet.

Nobody should get dragged along the ground who's not a corpse and unable to take offense, he'd concluded by the time she got him a decent distance away from the building. The conflagration had apparently not attracted the attention of the local fire department. That might not be a conspiracy, of course, since it was DC, not known for the quality of its municipal services.

He looked back at the burning warehouse with the full knowledge that he was punch-drunk and probably halfway in shock. A section of the roof fell in as he watched. It was a spork holocaust. The conventioneers were going to be disappointed this year.

When Scully went to retrieve the car he passed out.

End 3/6

Deny Nothing 4/6 RivkaT@aol.com

Alex awoke to the sounds of renewed vomiting. Not his own, he was relieved to determine.

Reports from different senses began to filter in, almost convincing him that unconsciousness would be a superior alternative. He was lying on the cheap motel bedspread with stray polyester strands digging into his body. He had been stripped to his underwear. His arm ached like he'd been stretched on the rack. His thigh muscles burned. His head thrummed like bongos in a frat house, and the vile taste in his mouth could have been used as a pesticide.

The retching noises stopped, he heard water running for a minute, and Dana Scully staggered out of the small bathroom. She looked so bad he could hardly believe he'd had sex with her.

Her face was moon-shaped. Over swollen cheeks, her eyes glittered feverishly, and her lips were almost colorless with pain.

She shuffled over to the bed and collapsed onto it.

"You've been out for five hours," she informed him tonelessly. "You seemed to have a nice nap. I'm still sick. I took an antiemetic but it doesn't seem to be working."

"You must have puked it up."

"It's not administered orally." Her eyelids went down as far as they could but failed to close entirely.

She smelled good, despite the illness.

He rolled to the side of the bed and swung his legs to the floor. The world spun like a merry-go-round.

In the bathroom, he pissed and squeezed a dollop of Scully's toothpaste directly into his mouth. He was always discovering new reasons to miss the standard complement of hands. He winced and tried to get his mouth passably clean.

Scully's stretched-tight skin was dotted with sweat when he returned. So, evidently the cure wasn't quite as effective the second time around. The medication was a success, doctor, but the patient died.

He couldn't have her in this condition. In any sense of the word. Alex reached for the phone and dialed. On the sixth ring, Ashley picked up.

"I need your help."

She didn't hesitate. "Where are you?" He was grateful that there was still honor left in the world, though he was also grateful that it was not his.

He looked on the hotel phone and read her the address and room number. "Bring drugs."

"Thirty minutes," she promised.

"Who'zzat?" Scully mumbled.

"A friend. Ashley's a doctor, she'll fix you up."

For some reason, Scully sparked like a match on flint at this. "Her name is Ashley?"

"You thought secret agents could only be Natacha or Marie-Claude?"

Her energy had been used up and he watched as she struggled to breathe. Obviously, Scully wasn't going to be any good for conversation, criminal or otherwise. He picked up the remote control. "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" was on, wasn't it?

****

"Did you hurt one of your fuck-toys?" Ashley asked as he opened the door. "I hate doing stitches."

Ashley was wearing her hair wavy, dark, and just past her shoulders these days. She arrived in a dark blue business suit and suede heels. He noticed that, though she was taller than Scully, her heels were almost as nosebleed- inducing. Maybe all professional women felt the need to get a little perspective that way. At least the deadly ones.

He stepped aside and put his gun away. "I think it's an allergic reaction." Ashley walked over the the bed and put her hand on Scully's forehead. Scully shuddered and tried to focus on the other woman.

"What happened?"

Alex sketched out an abridged history of Scully's relationship to the black oil and its viral load. She listened carefully. "I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, though no one let me know that at the time. I can deal."

She opened her medical bag and removed a syringe.

Scully's hand shot up and captured Ashley's wrist. "What?"

"It should bring the fever and the swelling down," Ashley reassured her. Scully's grip tightened and she pushed the syringe further away from her body.

"She's a doctor too," Alex explained.

Ashley frowned, but launched into a lecture that Scully apparently found sufficiently incomprehensible. In any event, she released her grasp and let Ashley inject her.

He channel-surfed as Ashley waited for the drug to take effect and examined Scully for other signs of trouble. In about twenty minutes, Scully's fever began to abate and her swollen flesh subsided visibly. Ashley gave him two more doses of the anti-inflammatory cocktail and a vial of painkillers for luck.

"I'll call you when we have a better idea of what's going on," he said as he showed her to the door.

She kissed him on the cheek. "Alex, I demand regular reports. It's so surprising to see you concerned for a female of the species."

Scully raised her head from the pillow, grunting with the effort. "Why don't you get your friends to check the rest of the sites out?"

"They want Mulder alive. That's no good reason to let them have him to themselves for any extended period of time. You might not like what you got back."

She blinked up at the ceiling and he could almost hear the microprocessors working. "What makes him so important?"

"What makes you think that it's him?"

She opened her mouth and made a sound that could, conceivably, have been mistaken for laughter. Pressing her fingertips, still swollen around her manicured nails, into her eyelids, Scully shook with desolate amusement.

Warily, he tried to map out a search pattern for the remaining sites on the list.

Scully refused to take another dose of the anti-inflammatory at the appointed time, but that was more a good sign than her continued acquiescence. For someone who painted herself as Mulder's opposite, she had a lot of his habits. She still looked ten years older and two sizes larger, but she'd live.

She showered again while he watched television and tried to think. Scully's intuition had gotten them to a very active site, but what did it mean? First, obviously the smuggler-whatevers were invested in the black cancer, not just in traditional metal weapons. It made sense to offer a varied arsenal these days -- one-stop shopping for tin-pot dictators and fanatics with dirty faces. That meant that the other sites were probably also still active, or had been eight hours ago. They needed to keep moving, and quickly. It was too bad Skinner had cut Scully off; they could have used a SWAT team or twelve. He would almost consider bringing his side into the search, but he'd told Scully the truth, or a first cousin once removed to the truth -- he didn't trust anyone else to take proper care of Mulder, particularly if whoever had him was using him for further viral experiments. There were plenty of people in the American branch of the Organization who wouldn't mind hanging on to Mulder while they tested to make sure that nothing new had been brewed out of his blood.

Scully returned wearing the previous day's suit. It looked like she needed to spend a few more weeks at Weight Watchers, but no buttons were obviously straining and she walked without wobbling on those killer heels. He'd have expected a more extensive wardrobe, but he guessed that she didn't like to carry the extra load around.

"We should rest," he pointed out. "It's almost dark and then we can look around some more." Without backup, darkness was their best bet. Particularly if Scully could guess a little better this time around.

Scully nodded absently and drifted over to him, moving like a ghost over the cheap carpet.

She reached out and unbuttoned his shirt. Pushing it off of his shoulders, she examined the straps of the prosthesis, then decisively reached for the critical buckle. She removed the harness and put the false arm on the bedside table. Her gaze felt like freezing rain on the reddened and whitened skin where the straps had rubbed his skin and hurt his circulation.

"Stop looking at me," he said and she brought her mouth down to the scar at the top of his shoulder. Freezing rain turned to red-hot iron.

Her tongue circled the line of amputation above and below, swirling over random nubs of flesh and fused skin. There couldn't possibly be any nerve endings there but when she sucked it was like getting a blow job.

She gave his arm more attention than the Russian doctors had, stroking and nibbling at every skin cell. He realized vaguely that he was babbling. "Fuck" and "you bitch" seemed to constitute the entirety of his current vocabulary.

Her little hands worked at his belt, pushing down his zipper, and he lifted his hips so that she could push his pants down. His cock sprang free, straight into her warm dry hand, and he groaned. "Suka ty zlo'ebuchaya." He hadn't been reduced to Russian since ... since Mulder, actually.

She pulled away just long enough to strip off her own skirt. When she slid down on him she was still wearing her jacket and blouse. She was like liquid gelatin around him.

He growled appreciation as she rose up, using her strong leg muscles to fuck him as he lay almost unmoving on the bed. His hips flexed but it was really her weight controlling them. Scully leaned forward and braced herself against his chest with her left hand, fingers flexing around his nipple. Her face was curiously blank, like a blow-up doll with her rosebud mouth perpetually pursed for easy entry. With her right hand, she reached past where her shirt flapped against his stomach and began to stroke herself.

Now he was rocking against her in earnest. He raised his hand to caress her cheek, letting his thumb slide past the pink of her swollen lips and into the parallel wetness of her mouth.

Scully closed her eyes and sucked on his thumb. He could feel her knuckles brushing against the top of his groin. Trailing his slick thumb down her chin to the hollow of her throat, he looked up at her straining face.

"Say his name, Scully," he urged. "It's okay."

Her eyes popped open like muzzle flashes and, laser-fast, she slapped him. He could smell the juices she left on his stinging cheek. "Not for you," she grated, then grabbed at his hips. She increased the pace; if she'd had reins on him she undoubtedly would have pulled them tight. This was fucking hard enough to require medical attention. She leaned closer and ground her pelvis into him, flushed and sweating from the stimulation. Her cheeks were so red they looked as if they'd been painted on her doll's face. Her shirt lashed against them as he squeezed her breast through the cotton.

She shook against him like a mechanical pony and then jerked sharply. He felt her contract around him and increased the strength of his thrusts as he moved his hand to her back, pulling her down, forcing her face into his throat where she bit him.

He pumped upwards and, without further ado, he was coming. The orgasm started somewhere in the region of his stump and arced through his body like heat lightning.

Scully slid to a halt on top of him. He realized that some of the wetness on his face came from his own tears, but he didn't know when they'd appeared.

She rolled off of him and he was cold. "Get some sleep," she ordered and left the bed. The bathroom door shut behind her.

After a few minutes, he struggled underneath the thin motel blanket. When she returned, she was in a T-shirt that smelled like Mulder, but she molded herself to his back despite the clothing.

He didn't expect to talk, but the words appeared in the air like fruit flies, generated from nothing. "He hit me, you know."

"I've seen," she told him sleepily.

"No, before. When we were together."

"Why did you stay, then?"

Ah, he'd known from the moment he met her that there was a good little right-wing, quit-your-bitching martinet under that expressionless federal face. "Why do you stay?" he jabbed back.

"He doesn't hit me." She was as stiff as an ironing board against him, and still so hot.

"Yes he does, Scully. He's just more careful with you because you're a girl. They tell me he brought you flowers when you got diagnosed ... He's very good at sorry."

"Why did you stay?"

He smiled, satisfied that he'd induced her to ask again. "All the usual, you know. The post-blowup courtship phase, the post-blowup courtship sex. Because I deserved it. Because I'm Ishmael and I neglected to tell Ahab that I joined Greenpeace on the sly."

She stopped breathing entirely and rolled away from him. He'd skipped the nerve endings and gone straight to the spine on that one. He wished that he had more time to figure her out; she was more intriguing than chess.

"And what's it like to be an errand-boy for secret government plots?" she asked finally, and her voice didn't shake at all.

"The Organization's everything that's wrong with America, just like football. Violence punctuated by committee meetings."

"Yet you found it convenient to follow their instructions."

"I didn't kill her, Scully," he ventured.

"Are you aware of the definition of 'accessory to murder'?" Her voice was low and dangerous, and he tried to remember where she'd left her gun.

"Look, when I figured out what I was really into, I left."

"To sell what you knew to the highest bidder."

"Everyone sells. It's just a question of price. At least mine is fungible. If you hold a gun to a pile of dollar bills I'll just walk away. But look how you and Mulder behave when the other one is threatened -- you make yourselves so vulnerable, you shouldn't wonder why you can never succeed."

"And you, Alex, where has your willingness to compromise others gotten you? You've lost an arm and you're on the run. You don't seem to be the King of the World yet."

In the darkness, he edged closer to her and caught a whiff of Mulder's smell. "Just you wait, Scully," his hand stroked the cotton T-shirt over her warm rounded hip, "I'll send you a postcard when I kill James Cameron and take over the position."

She sighed loudly but didn't push his hand away as it investigated further. Her cunt was still slick with a mixture of their bodily fluids and it was just as much a dead end as any anal passage; there'd be no paternity suits arising from this little adventure. Her hips twitched, inviting his fingers to speed up.

Alex pulled at her half-resisting body until she was on her stomach, her face in the cheap hotel pillow and her body a dark star radiating energy underneath him. His knees between her outstretched legs, he shifted until he could enter her from behind. The sensation of his balls slapping against her thighs was different because the angle was slightly off, but it was still good.

He pressed his nose into Mulder's shirt and breathed it in as if he were attempting autoerotic asphyxiation. When this was over it would smell of all three of them, Mulder's unique trail would be obliterated, and that gave him a small sense of satisfaction. Underneath the shirt, Scully writhed, and he moved his hand to allow her to rub against him more effectively.

The sensations of her climax were more diffuse than with a man, and whether because of that or because it was the second time in one night he kept slamming into her, pulling as far out as he dared and then sliding back hard enough to leave bruises. When she moaned in protest he moved his hand up to cover her mouth and she sucked on the skin of his palm. He thought he could feel the fever blister rise in response.

It was dreamlike, really. He was in and out of her but flashing back to Mulder's uncomfortable leather couch, Mulder furious at his own needs and begging Alex to fuck him, just do it, get it over with. Alex had thought that he owned Mulder then and he still wasn't sure when the leash had begun to run the other way, when it had tangled around his legs and brought him down. Mulder's back was to Alex, his hands gripping the wooden frame of the couch through the padded leather as if gravity had failed and he'd fall upwards if he let go. He was still wearing his undershirt, making Alex work for every revelation, but his tight naked ass was visible and that was more than enough for the moment. He braced himself on Mulder's shoulders -- Scully's shoulders -- and he could feel both arms, not with phantom pain but with absolute confidence as he stroked towards ecstasy.

He exploded like a week-old corpse, imagining his come inside Mulder and following in Mulder's wake, colonizing what had been free. From now on it would be different with them, he thought slowly as satisfaction buzzed through his body. He'd always be there.

Scully rolled over and checked the alarm to make sure that it would go off in an hour, and then she was still. Alex had learned long ago how to seize every possible fragment of sleep, so he closed his eyes and hoped not to dream.

End 4/6

Deny Nothing 5/6 RivkaT@aol.com

They spent the remainder of the night running down the list. The other storage facilities and houses and storefronts were all empty, abandoned. Past midnight and the smugglers' ball had turned into a pumpkin. There were random scraps of paper here and there, but they were certainly distractions.

There was no disguising it -- they'd blown their one chance to find Mulder.

He could tell that Scully knew it. She blamed herself, although if Alex had been running things he'd just have started at the top of the list and the chance that Mulder had been there was slim indeed. If he did say anything, she'd be able to react with anger, dampening some of the self-blame. And he didn't want that. If Mulder was dead his one satisfaction would be Scully's pain.

She'd most likely fucked him out of some weird mix of guilt and rebellion -- Mulder can't be dead, God, because he has to be able to get mad at me for this. Alex could empathize with that.

So they'd walked through dust and drag marks at twelve different locations, still smelling of sex and each other, and nothing more had been said. Twelve, with the thirteenth and the black oil like a Judas's kiss in the background.

Finally, at daybreak, they'd decided to split up. He would hit his contacts one more time: Now that he knew that there was a black oil connection, they might be a little more interested in finding out the exact flavor of shit Mulder had fallen into this time. Scully was off to find out what the Gunmen had determined about the interlocking layers of ownership behind the original import/export company, the legitimate front for the whole nasty business.

He was trotting towards a meeting with his contact, ostensibly a G-14 who worked in the Department of Energy, when he felt it.

His missing arm itched, a thousand red ants hissing along ghost flesh.

He was being watched.

Gooseflesh rose, or would have risen, phantom guard hairs standing erect.

He was being targeted.

This was like being an old fogey in a nursing home whose aching bones signalled an approaching storm. His instincts, while good, had never before caused a physical reaction. It might not be trustworthy. Which would only make it like everything else he knew.

There was a way to find out. Five steps ahead of him a short redhead in a beige trenchcoat paused to dig in her handbag. Her shiny bobbed hair swung into her eyes. As Alex caught up to her, he could tell it was a dye job, but a good one.

"Excuse me," he said as she dug the Red Kamels out from underneath the pens, tissues, and beeper swirled in the depths of the bag, "but could I bum a cigarette off of you?"

She began to shake her head and then took a good look at him. Her eyes were brown, but he doubted his watcher could see that. "Sure," she said as if she hadn't been about to blow him off. She smiled and tapped on the end of the pack.

Alex eased himself around so that she was between him and the source of the (imagined?) surveillance. They moved out of the flow of foot traffic, close to the concrete bulk of a government office that radiated warmth onto the sidewalk. A concrete pillar to his left provided potential cover.

"It's good to find a fellow smoker among all these humorless government types," he said easily as he accepted the cigarette.

She smiled wider, recognizing the come-on. "You work around here?" She produced a lighter and held it up so that he had to lean towards her to reach the flame.

Just as the cigarette tip began to glow cherry-red, the lighter jerked away and Alex felt the hot shower-spray of blood on his cheek. As his helpful sacrificial lamb collapsed, he drew his gun and his eyes tracked the source of the shot and identified the gunman, raising his weapon to fire again.

The cigarette was falling as Alex returned fire. The woman's body shook as another bullet plowed through her, and Alex pressed himself against the pillar for better cover. The grey-suited GS types around him were dropping to the ground like falling leaves, screaming and bringing their hands over their heads as if this were some sort of bomb drill.

Gunfire always made him feel this way, like he could run around town looking up girls' skirts while everyone else was Krazy Glued in place. Only men with guns could move that fast; for everyone else the air molecules had stopped still, creating invisible prisons around each person. He fired at the other killer, dancing over the woman's still-falling body as he went. Someone in his target range dropped, though it could easily have been a hapless EPA lawyer who'd been drafted as a human shield.

The magazine of his gun was empty. Reloading was a stone bitch with only one arm, so he devoutly hoped that the gunman's disappearance was due to death rather than prudence.

Alex risked a quick glance down at his unfortunate companion. She looked surprised, and bloody. He thought her chest was still moving feebly beneath her sodden coat, exit wounds like roses on the fabric.

"Cigarettes'll kill you," he told her and began to dash towards the Metro.

His cellphone rang as he entered the gaping maw of the escalator well. He reholstered his gun and fumbled for the phone, finally hitting the on button with his thumb.

"Yeah."

"It's me," Scully said. "I've got a lead. The man who's bankrolling the import/export company. He's known to have ties to arms dealers, but he's managed to make some high government friends so no action has been taken."

"I just left you for dead," he responded.

"What?"

"Someone just shot a woman I was talking to because she looked like you. Where are you now?"

In the silence, he realized that she had to be thinking about her sister. He would be so much better off, he mused, if the X Files agents had been only children.

"I'm with friends." Beautiful, a good shot, and paranoid. Alex thought that he might be in the throes of a crush.

"Stay there, don't answer the phone. I'll pick you up and we'll track your lead." He hung up as the escalator touched bottom and loped towards the Farecard machines.

He'd get to Dupont Circle and steal a car with handicapped plates for the remainder of the trip, he decided. He was entitled, after all.

****

Frohike opened the door, though Alex was sure he had to stand on tiptoe to reach the highest locks. Alex was beginning to get used to the T-shirt and flak jacket look on the older man.

"What do you get out of this, Mr. Krycek?" Frohike asked as they travelled down the dingy hallway towards the main computer room.

"If anyone kills Mulder, it's going to be me."

Frohike's shoulders stiffened underneath Kevlar, but he didn't respond otherwise. Alex concluded that Frohike never took the vest off except in the shower. He might have a few, so that he could take one for dry cleaning when it got too smelly. It was more evidence that a person can get used to anything.

Scully had commandeered the largest computer, with the best vantage point to attack any unwanted visitors. He couldn't see it, but she probably had the nicest chair, too. Only the best for Dana Scully.

"We found someone who's made an awful lot of money off of exporting to Korea," Byers said, his beard a little askew as if he'd forgotten to trim it in the excitement. "Profits have only increased in the past year as the Asian economy collapsed, and that essentially rules out any law-abiding business."

"Other than pornography," Alex suggested, but no one smiled.

Scully looked up at him. He couldn't see her eyes from the glare off of her glasses. "The Gunmen think he fills orders for North Korea and other rogue nations, acquiring weapons of all sorts. If that's the case, then he could have lured Mulder to this operation."

"But why --?"

She tapped at the keyboard. "Assume that they have government contacts. The presence of the black oil indicates that they are trafficking in exotic weaponry. Presumably they would like to be able to guard against it as well as inflict it on others." Scully looked around the room, drawing the Gunmen's attention to her like a fisherman working three lines. "Gentlemen, could you excuse us for a moment?"

Langly opened his mouth to object, but Frohike got a hand around his collar -- it looked like he picked up some of Langly's stringy yellow hair as well -- and pulled him from his chair. "Come on," he said. "Some things we're better off not knowing just yet." Byers followed the two of them out without protest.

Alex watched them go, wondering what there was to know about Frohike that he'd missed.

"In an effort to keep his job, and allow me to keep mine, after the events surrounding Mulder's unapproved side trip to Tunguska, he was unusually forthcoming with the OPR investigators. They thought he was a lunatic, which I suppose was the point. What that means is that, in the FBI's files, there exists a description of the procedures to which he was subjected in Russia. A description meaningless to anyone who does not know what to look for, but if an informed person were to look --"

Alex was nodding, following the demented logic of it. "They'd know he'd been vaccinated. And to lure him to a weapons smuggling business for the antibodies in his blood with the promise of learning more about domestic terrorism --"

"It would appeal to someone with a sense of the poetic."

"But, Scully, why not you?"

She looked at the computer screen. "Mulder never told anyone but me what he thought I was infected with. Even I didn't know if I could believe -- but I suppose my confirmation was in that warehouse yesterday. He'll never let me live it --" She stopped as her voice dropped into unnecessary roughness. When she spoke again, her voice was as smooth as well-stirred cake batter. "From what Mulder could tell, the Russians didn't have a very effective cure. He was ... lucky ... to survive. Unless it was more than luck."

"I can't tell you about that," he whispered. "It's not worth your life." Visions of dossiers and breeding charts, not very much like sugarplums, danced in his head.

She rubbed her temples as if her head hurt. "That's not the point. We have ... confirmation that you and I carry the appropriate resistance. If necessary ..."

"Don't even say it. Two people with the antibodies just means two customers can be satisfied instead of just one. These are terrorists we're talking about here, there's no monopoly on it." He'd seen what the Russians had done in the lab outside Moscow. The woman had been hooked up to a hundred machines, anticoagulants pumping through her and other drugs to trick her body into producing as many units of plasma as possible. She was piss-yellow because something had gone wrong with her liver after all the drugs. And the Russians were comparatively well-funded butchers; Saddam and the Koreans were unlikely to be as competent.

Scully's mouth set into stone, voluptuous and unforgiving as Michelangelo's sculpture. "There are people in the FBI who don't agree that treachery against this nation should go unwatched, even if we're not allowed to act. Mulder and I have helped them, when we could, and they owe us. I'm gathering information about the man in charge of this scheme, Michael Grathyn, and I expect a call from my contact telling us where he and his most trusted confederates can be found."

Alex nodded. Sometimes it was important to go straight to the top. Especially when you were out of time.

He watched her work for a few minutes, but his mind wandered. He remembered his favorite college professor. He had been the most overt older gay man Alex had ever met, before or since. He would routinely come to class in tight faded jeans, a tighter white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. He had salt-and-pepper buzz-cut hair and a neat little mustache, and he knew he was hot as hell. He wouldn't sleep with students, though. He said it was because it wasn't right, but Alex thought he mostly liked to tease.

Alex had taken a class on Gay Men in Literature from Professor Stone, in large part because it seemed to shock his handler, who wanted a multilingual operative and not a polymorphously perverse one. As it happened, the class was full of pretty boys and it had been a useful semester. But now he remembered Professor Stone lecturing on homoeroticism, how literature is full of two competing men who turn their sublimated desire for one another into a competition for the love of one woman.

At the time, he'd thought that was a relic of sexual repression; maybe closeted fellows had to do that because they could only lay each other by proxy, but ever since Stonewall there was no need to beat around the bush, so to speak.

He thought he understood a little bit better now. It wasn't just about sexuality, Tab A and Slot B. It was desire, and the way that desire could be so much hotter, so much tighter than actually getting what you want. While you desire, the one you want is perfect. It is only when desire ends and reality begins that your lover will disappoint you. Scully was desire because she was a layer separating him from Mulder. Scully was desire because with her, he could imagine Mulder's jealousy.

She was still feeding queries into the FBI's secure system. It would probably take an electromagnetic pulse to distract her from that. She clicked the mouse to follow a link and looked up at him as she waited for the page to load. "Yes?"

"If I'm his other side, and you're his other half, what does that make us?"

"Seriously disturbed," she said and looked back down at the computer screen.

Soon enough, she was done and there was little to do but wait. He paced through the room as if it might expand if he tried hard enough. It reminded him of the missile silo, though with slightly better lighting and the odor of stale potato chips rather than oil and dust and his own blood on the door from where his fingernails had broken off. The brown sticky carpet was covered with power cords, taped and loose, like the floor of a mechanical jungle.

"When's your friend going to call?" he asked when the silence had reached his throat and threatened to drown him.

Scully's shoulders twitched, the only evidence that she hadn't actually turned into a statue. "I don't know. He knows it's urgent."

"Nobody at the Bureau thinks that saving Spooky is urgent." He sped up a little so that the room spun. If he made himself dizzy and fell down, she'd wake him when it was time to go. When he turned quickly, the anime posters on the wall seemed to move and leer at him.

Her voice was a jagged-edged blade. "Stop that. You're making me sick."

If he had to wait much longer he would kill himself. No, that was crazy thinking. He would kill her. He hurried over to the corner farthest from her and looked at the filing cabinet there. There was a simple five-button combination lock with wear marks that made it immediately clear which buttons were used to open it. He began trying combinations and, three in, the top drawer popped open.

"Does it bother you that your little friends keep their EZ Cheeze under lock and key?" There were crackers, too, but for some reason the spray cheese seemed stranger.

She sighed. "I'm sure they have some horror story of a truth-seeker poisoned by snack items too easily vulnerable to government tampering."

Yeah, he'd read that incident report too. He closed the top drawer and went to work on the middle one. Maybe they kept some good fuck films here too. Statistically there was almost a one-third chance that one of them liked boys. And he wouldn't have thrown Byers out of bed for eating sunflower seeds.

He heard her behind him and had to tear his remaining fingers out of the way as she slammed the file drawer closed. "Do you think you could calm down?" She was the voice of reason, but he didn't want to be reasoned with. There had to be something here he could kill.

"No, I'm planning on freaking out until we find out what's happened to Mulder. You don't know about the virus, what it does --"

She pushed him against the file cabinet with a crash, and he felt the cold metal through his clothes. "Don't tell me what I don't know! Not unless you're prepared to give me some answers."

Alex turned to face her and was once again surprised that he had to look down. Her eyes were bright with frustration and anger, and knowing that his feelings were shared didn't help at all.

It was surreal, but not entirely unexpected, when she reached for his belt. Mulder, too, would rather fuck than spend time alone in his own head. He wondered, as she drew his zipper down and let his pants fall around his knees, whether she'd only learned this from Mulder or if her emotional blankness had been part of the initial attraction.

When her mouth closed over his cock all thought ceased. He wrapped his fingers around the cool metal handle that had been poking into the small of his back, for balance, and fucked her mouth with all his fear and uncertainty. She held on to his hips, her thumbs digging deep into the hollows created by his pelvic bone. The wet pressure was like being sucked out of an airplane, into the blue sky of her eyes.

His cock was a knife stabbing into her as he came forever and ever.

She pulled away as his knees threatened to betray him and he sagged against the filing cabinet, watching her wipe her mouth without any apparent unease. Mulder hated to swallow, but Scully had been better trained. He stared as she went to the other side of the room to retrieve her makeup case and reapplied her lipstick, then realized that he ought to make himself more presentable when she smirked at him with her freshly blotted lips.

He tried to speak, and discovered that he needed to clear his throat first. "What's happening here, Scully?"

"Did you know that on her wedding night, a Spartan wife had to wear a man's cloak and a man's sandals to meet her husband in bed?"

"Watching the Discovery Channel again?"

She gave him a strange look, as if he were reading from the wrong script.

End 5/6

Deny Nothing 6/6 RivkaT@aol.com

After that he'd been reduced to seeking out the Gunmen, and together they went adventuring with Lara Croft until Scully found them.

Her informant had finally come through. They had half an ounce of luck -- Grathyn's arms dealing business was built on ties to several national mafia. His closest confederate in town was a man with strong Family connections, the son of a Jersey capo. What that meant was that his position was a product of nepotism rather than skill. Scully's shadowy FBI friends said that Gennaro the younger was weak, he could be turned if necessary. Alex could tell from the set of her mouth as she hung up the phone that her contacts were going to be furious if she went ahead and broke Gennaro just to get information about Mulder. If she did they'd have to find another way into Grathyn's organization in the future.

She'd burnt some bridges, this time, but she didn't care. It was another thing to respect about her, that like any good general she knew when to send the foot soldiers to their deaths.

They drove to the Gennaro's office, where he supposedly oversaw the complicated negotiations with Customs required to get electronics in and out of the country. Alex had no doubt that his job involved government employees and negotiations, but he thought that it was unlikely that the shipping manifests described the exact nature of Grathyn's business.

Scully intimidated the cleaning lady into letting them onto Gennaro's floor. He was, as she'd been promised, still at work. There was a bodyguard outside his door -- for a few seconds at least, before Alex shot him in the forehead. He hadn't put on a silencer and he could hear the man in the office as he bolted out of his chair, probably knocking it over in his fright.

Scully kicked the door open and rolled into the room, her gun aimed at the man who was only then reaching into his desk drawer. "Back away!" she ordered. "Hands on your head!"

Wisely, he complied.

"Paul Gennaro?"

He nodded. Scully was upright now, gesturing for him to come around the desk where she could see his whole body.

"My partner and I are FBI agents," Scully said, and Alex was once again struck with admiration for her ability to tell absolute truth in a perfectly misleading fashion. "I do not care if your confession gets thrown out of court because I threatened you. I have an unregistered gun in my purse, and if your dead hand is holding it when the police arrive I will be a hero and you will be a criminal's corpse. Tell me where Fox Mulder is."

Alex felt the warm hum of arousal again. Beauty is only skin deep, but deadly goes right down to the bone.

Gennaro gasped and Alex thought there was a telltale darkening at his crotch. "He ... it turned out that he was on the Koreans' wish list too. For another five million he went along with the satellites."

Scully stepped forward and slid her gun across Gennaro's temple, past his eye and down the sagging flesh below his jaw. The man was shaking like a convert in the throes of religious ecstasy. "*Where*?"

He told them.

****

They threw Gennaro into the trunk of Alex's latest stolen car. Couldn't have him calling his best buds in the organization, could they? Scully'd be dodging a Mob hit for years after this. Alex wasn't planning on being anywhere La Cosa Nostra knew about.

If she was lucky, Gennaro would be too humiliated to have been bested by a woman to admit his role in the whole disaster, and she'd be safe.

As they drove towards Baltimore, where there was a ship in port waiting to sail beyond the sunset, Scully made a call. "Langly? I need your help. There's a chance we'll need more translations, quick ... yes, borrow one of Frohike's ... no, I'm not going to let you ... all right." She gave him the ship information and hung up.

"I have a decent array of medical supplies in my bag. I should be able to take care of him when we find him."

Alex didn't need to point out that they'd probably been bleeding Mulder minutes after they found him. There was no telling how much damage had been done, even assuming that he hadn't left U.S. soil yet.

Driving with Mulder had always been a challenge. Just when he thought he could drift off, Mulder would lob some crazy theory over the mental net and he'd have to respond, if only to keep Mulder interested. Now, he felt that he deserved equal entertainment from Scully. She had to be used to it, being Mulder's regular partner, his usual straight woman in both senses.

He had the advantage over Scully, because she had to keep her eyes on the road. Traffic was fairly light on the Beltway this time of night, but that only meant that the cars were sliding from lane to lane at seventy-five miles per hour instead of sixty. "I wonder what he'd say if I told him you give better head than he does."

Scully hit the turn signal, probably giving anyone behind her a heart attack, and moved into the far left lane. "He'd probably believe you. He has problems with self-esteem."

"You don't have an ounce of sentiment, do you?"

"I think I had a perfume by that name once. It was too expensive for me, so I gave it up."

Ah, the infamous Scully humor. He'd heard about it ad nauseum, but experiencing it from this perspective was another thing altogether.

Before Scully, he'd thought that sex was a weapon to be withheld, that it was a currency to be spent. He'd never known that it was possible to do so much damage by consenting.

The Harbor Tunnel sign appeared, and Scully took the last exit before the toll.

****

The Gunmen must have had a portable wormhole in their hideaway; they were less than fifteen minutes behind. Langly was the only one who emerged from the serial killer panel van to join them; Alex saw Frohike behind the wheel, waiting to spirit them away if they required a hasty retreat.

Alex needed to clarify one issue with Scully before they proceeded to the proper dock. "I assume from your reaction to the bodyguard's death that killing is not going to raise your federal hackles here."

Langly stared at Scully as if she'd morphed into Emma Peel. Scully didn't respond. "Do you need a gun?" she asked Langly, who shook his head once, slowly.

"Then let's go."

The nightwatchman reacted well to Alex's DEA ID. Langly's borrowed flak jacket didn't hurt, either. He told them that there had been an unusual amount of activity around the target ship for the past few nights. He confided that he'd thought it might be drugs. Yeah, whatever.

The trouble with ships was that it wasn't very easy to approach them unnoticed. They could steal a smaller boat and board from the side, but he hadn't played pirate in a long time and usually pirates had missing eyes or hands, not entire arms. It wreaked havoc with balance in swordfighting.

"I could go up and tell them we have an urgent message," Langly suggested.

Alex looked at him, trying not to be too patronizing. "And that would help us how?"

"I'd say it in Korean."

Scully nodded. "It might be our best strategy. Krycek, you hold my hands behind my back as if I'm a prisoner. Langly, you tell them that you're bringing another person like the one they've already got."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Distant lights reflected off of the blond's glasses, making him look like Andy Warhol's inbred cousin at the disco.

"Just say it's got something to do with the blood, they didn't tell you more."

Langly nodded and Scully shifted so that her hands were behind her back, clasped loosely as if she were being restrained. One gun was in her right hand and he could see the outline of another at her waistband. He didn't want his own hand occupied, even with a mock captivity, and so he concentrated and managed to get the prosthesis to close around her wrist. She jumped in surprise but he held on. "It reacts to contractions in the muscles of the upper arm," he whispered and reached for his gun, for reassurance.

Slowly, they walked up the pier towards the ramp onto the foreign ship. Alex pushed Scully a few times, just for verisimilitude, and she stumbled, likely with a similar motive.

A dark figure appeared from an unlit cabin door and said something. Langly spoke back with commendable self-assurance. A few volleys and they were motioned on board. Other men, mostly Asian but all with identical thuglike demeanors, materialized from parts unknown and they were surrounded on the narrow walkway between the ship's cabins and the railing at the side. Alex pressed close behind Scully to hide the fact that she was armed and dangerous, but the strangers only looked at her like she was a combination between a winning lottery ticket and a pornographic pinup. He wondered briefly if she was aware that in this case sexism was her friend.

Langly's tone was alternating between beseeching and commanding, and one of his interlocutors waved them into the ship's interior. Alex liked that much better, with narrow passageways and limited visibility, the fact that they were exponentially outnumbered became significantly less relevant. He didn't like the trapped-rat look on Langly's face much, though, and attempted to nod encouragement as discreetly as possible.

Three men preceded them and two followed. With his hand on Scully's shoulder to shield her back from view, Alex pushed her over the threshold into the ship. He couldn't look back to see if Langly would follow.

Turn and turn again, he wished that he had a trail of breadcrumbs to leave, but how many ways out of a ship could there be, anyway? A narrow flight of rubber-covered nonslip stairs led into the belly of the beast where the light was green and dirty. They traversed another hallway, even narrower than the ones above the waterline. The voices of the men echoed off the metal walls, the distortion plus the unknown language turning the sound into something like a memory of his own screams in the silo.

Scully stumbled over the lip of a door and then they were inside, looking at Mulder. He was strapped down like Gulliver after the Lilliputians found him. Transparent plastic tubes stole fluids from him and forced new ones back in. He had a perfectly predictable bruise darkening his left cheekbone and a padded headrest with a chin strap, the kind used to keep accident victims' spines straight, kept his head immobile. His faded hazel eyes focused quickly, lighting with fury when he found Krycek's face and then redoubling their intensity as he found Scully like a snake sighting a mongoose.

"Motherfucker," he accused through the distortion of the straps holding him down. Alex rolled his eyes, turned to see if there was anyone else in the hallway, and shot the two men behind him. He felt rather than heard Scully's shots as she dispatched the three who'd preceded them into the room. In the confined space, the shots were louder than watching 'Armageddon' in Dolby Surround Sound, but he couldn't guess how well the sound would carry.

He stuck the gun back in its holster and grabbed the man closest to him, who'd fallen across the doorway, to drag him into the room. "Get the other one in here and try to clean up the blood," he ordered Langly, whose thick nerd glasses concealed his expression admirably. "If they don't figure it out for a while we'll be better off."

Langly complied and Alex moved to Mulder's bedside. Scully had already freed his head. She must share Alex's conviction that the vital part of Mulder was his mouth. "What's *he* doing here?" Mulder whined.

"Cannon fodder," Scully said shortly and took the knife Alex held out to her, cutting through his remaining bonds with the efficiency of a dominatrix closing shop for the night. "Hold still!" she chided, but Mulder immediately began pulling the IV needles out. Alex could smell the blood in the air. Scully was doing something near Mulder's groin that made him wince -- that would be the catheter coming out. The weekend's worth of stubble on Mulder's chin looked really good, Alex realized. It would be beyond the sandpaper stage, into needle-sharpness. Acupuncture and musk; he could almost imagine how it would feel against his thighs.

"There's some shouting in the hall," Langly warned.

Alex looked around the room. There were no other exits. He waved Langly away from the door as Mulder struggled to his feet. Barefoot and in boxers, he could have been coming from a weekend of sexual adventure, especially factoring in the blood and bruises. Alex saw Scully hand Mulder one of her guns, which he took with a shaking hand.

"Scully," Alex nodded his head to the side of the door, "cover me." She reluctantly let go of Mulder and moved into position.

The door swung out and Alex heard shouted demands. "They want to talk to one of their comrades," Langly translated.

"I should have saved one for later," he said, shrugging. "On three, we'll go out firing." He felt Scully's tense agreement. "One --"

"This was your great escape plan?" Mulder sniped, determined to hog center stage as always.

"Two --"

"Did you find my clothes?"

"Three," and he leaped through the doorway, over the metal lip, and hit the stump of his arm against the opposite wall with the force of his momentum, firing through the pain. Scully was at his feet, twisting like a cat avoiding a water pistol as she fired low. They had a few seconds of shock on their side and managed to get three men down while the others retreated.

Langly helped Mulder out into the hall. Now there were two ways to go, the way they'd come and into the unknown, with no guarantee of any exit to the surface. Alex looked back and forth, trying to decide.

"This way," Scully suggested, gesturing down the hall where they'd never yet been.

That decided it. "No, we're going back the way we came."

"Why?" Scully demanded, her soft round mouth stretching thin and pale with her irritation, and Mulder's snarl indicated that he was going to back her up on general principles.

"You picked last time, remember?"

She hesitated and then began to follow him towards the stairs. "What is he *talking* about?" Mulder complained as they went, his arm thrown around Langly's shoulders like he'd had a really rough night on the town. "Scully? Ow!" and Alex couldn't help but look, Mulder's pain drew him like a magnet, but it was only that he'd put his bare foot down on a dead man's wristwatch.

The sex wasn't *that* good, was it? he asked himself, knowing full well that it had been.

There was no one on the stairs, but they couldn't possibly get out without a welcoming party. And if they waited, the men on the ship could get others for reinforcements. They stumbled up the stairs, huddled together like the actors on Friends. Alex swung his prosthesis through the doorway, and nothing happened, so he pulled it back, waited five seconds, and tried again. This time shots blasted through the air and one even clipped the plastic hand, the force of the shot wrenching against the straps around his shoulder.

He felt like the Sundance Kid reenacting the Mexican shootout at the end of the film. They didn't call him 'Butch' Cassidy for nothing. He shook his head to clear it and considered, for a moment, the question of God's existence. Unlikely, he concluded as he always did. Just before he would have jumped into the hallway, Scully grabbed his arm.

"That pipe's got steam in it," she informed him over the blood buzzing in his ears. "Let me shoot it out and we'll get some cover." She suited actions to words and the hall began to fill with hot white smoke. Then, an instant later, the little vixen trampled him and went through the doorway. Cursing, he followed her through, firing as he went.

The next few moments passed in a haze of muzzle flashes through gauzy whiteness. For each flash he saw, he had a bullet. He could see the dock ahead of him, a brown blur through the larger blur of the doorway to the open air. A man darted past the opening and fired in passing. Alex felt a body slam into him like a sack of sugar, hot and too light to be either of the men, and he barely kept his footing as he tried not to trip over the dead men clogging the narrow hallway while helping Scully stay upright.

Alex half-turned to prop her up and when she pushed away his help his hand was covered in blood. There was no time to evaluate the injury; if she was able to move that had to be good enough. Instinct led him to fire again just as a gunman, probably the same one, streaked across his field of vision like a target in a video game. The enemy cried out and fell against the ship's railing. Most of him stayed on board, but some of his guts fell into the Chesapeake Bay.

Mulder pushed forward until he was shoulder to shoulder with Alex. "We've got to get out," he informed Alex in a demonstration of the brilliance and insight for which he was justly famous. They edged forward in tandem, pressed up against opposite sides of the hallway. Alex heard three shots behind them, two far and one close, and since he didn't die and the noise then ceased he inferred that Scully had managed to resolve the problem. His father would have liked Scully, he realized as he ducked around the doorway and killed another man. Her gender would have been a major bonus, and likely sufficient to get Dad's blessing, but Dad would have liked her spunk -- a very American term, a very American concept. Two more shots and there was nothing moving along the path between them and the ramp to the dock.

Alex spotted motion on the dock as they hustled down to solid ground. It was the gray panel van, wheeling to the rescue. Byers slid back the side door and they piled in, Mulder landing heavily on Alex. Mulder hadn't been washed in days and Alex, half-hard with the adrenaline already, couldn't resist him. He dropped his gun to the carpet and ran his hand down Mulder's greyhound hip and upper thigh. Mulder wiggled impatiently, not even noticing as he demanded to know where Scully was hit. The waistband of the cotton boxers was damp with his sweat and Alex's hips flexed against that incredible ass. He was going to come in this dirty old van with the Lone Gunmen ranged around him like a bar-quality travelling rock band and Dana Scully watching.

Mulder saved Alex's dignity by pulling away, still giving no sign that he'd noticed that Alex had some unresolved issues surrounding their relationship. "Are you all right?" His tone was low and intimate when he talked to Scully, the way it always was when they were in company. When he thought they were alone, he didn't try so hard.

"I'm fine," she said. "We should go to a hospital, though."

"A hospital?" Langly said, panic on his voice like garlic breath. "How are we going to explain a gunshot wound?"

"Mulder needs to be checked out," Scully insisted, as if she weren't bleeding from a hole in her upper arm.

"I'm fine, but Scully needs a doctor," Mulder said, staring into Scully's eyes. Mulder was pawing her unwounded arm like a cat humping its owner's leg and she was on the seat between his legs, his thighs securing her from every bump and jolt.

"I want to do a blood test as soon as possible," she told him, her voice lowering to match his as her mouth swooped down towards his ear. Strangely, she didn't seem to be reacting to Mulder's proximity in any other way. If Mulder had been wrapped around him like that he wouldn't have been able to finish a sentence, much less continue to put butterfly bandages on Mulder's scrapes. Maybe they weren't actually -- was it possible that he hadn't lost his chance?

"Give me a phone," Alex ordered, as much to break into the conversation as for any other reason. "I know someone who can help us out."

He dialed Ashley and she gave him the location of a safe house nearby.

"How did you find me?" Mulder was asking Scully as Alex hung up. Mulder's tone made the question sound like an invitation to come see his etchings. Alex sighed, feeling jealousy in his gut like a bad case of food poisoning, and leaned over the driver's seat to give Frohike the address. Then he called in an anonymous tip to the police that there was a man locked in the trunk of a stolen car down by the docks. He made sure to mention the handicapped plates so that the cops would know where to look.

****

Ashley bound Scully's arm quickly, in deference to Scully's evident hatred of her own weakness. She even let Scully administer her own shots. If the wound hadn't been in the arm, Alex would have expected Scully to sew it up herself. Part of him wanted her to get gangrene and lose the arm; then they would be much closer to being twins.

When Ashley went to check on Mulder's condition and Mulder smiled up at her beautiful, superior face, he checked Scully's expression and was certain that it matched his own -- lip raised in an almost imperceptible sneer, head raised in righteous indignation.

Why do we let him do this to us, he wondered. And when did there start to be an us?

"And who are you?" Mulder asked silkily, all but batting his lovely thick lashes. Alex realized that he was grinding his teeth. Scully appeared at Mulder's side, pushing Ashley away and making her own reconnaissance of his vitals.

"I can take care of him from here," Scully announced. "If you'd like to stay I'm sure a number of people in the Bureau would be interested in hearing your stories." Her eyes flashed up at Alex's, sending him a clear message: Leave now and you go in peace. The flag of truce was about to drop and he needed to get out before it hit the ground.

But not before he got the last word. "What's wrong, Scully? Won't you dance with the one what brung ya?" He was proud of his naturalized drawl, and prouder still that her hand went to her neck, where the marks he'd made hid under a flawless macquillage. Mulder looked up at her curiously and she dropped her hand to his shoulder before she could wipe away her own protective coloring.

"Go," she said, and because it sounded enough like a plea to satisfy his ego, he did, trusting Ashley to follow.

****

Later that night, Alex watched the lights go down in Mulder's apartment. He was waiting in yet another stolen car. He was starting to like the ones with handicap plates.

Scully left five minutes after the bedroom light dimmed. Mulder hated the light when it wasn't illuminating either weirdness or sexual activity. The only way he could ever get the lights bright enough to read in Mulder's apartment was by exhausting Mulder so that he wouldn't protest when Alex turned the lamps up. He'd occasionally considered bondage just to get a chance to read the Post all the way through.

They'd probably just cuddled, still in pain from their respective injuries. Once, when Mulder was deeply asleep, Alex had curled close to his finely muscled back and run his hands over Mulder's body as if searching for his aura, feeling the hairs rise with the electricity rising from Mulder's skin like steam. He liked a man with a body at least as broad and fit as his own, and in that bed, that night, Mulder had been everything he'd ever wanted.

Then his beeper hummed on the nightstand and he had to go to a meeting with the smoker, and that was that.

Back in the now, his shaking fingers tapped at the glowing numbers on his stolen cellphone. "Mulder," the voice rumbled through the airwaves like Roxane's voice falling down to Cyrano in the darkness where they could both imagine he was Christian. "What?" he was impatient, bringing Alex back to reality.

"I just wanted to make sure you were doing all right."

There was a pause. "Scully says that you were quite helpful in finding me."

"Is that what she says?" his tone was mocking, though he didn't really mean it to be.

"Thank you," Mulder clarified.

He breathed in the stale sweat of the car's real owner, wondering idly what the owner's disability was. "I want to make things right with you, Mulder."

"Show me proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence on Earth." Mulder's voice finally had the intimacy he'd missed for so long. Of course Mulder had no idea that he was only a hundred feet away.

"Wouldn't you like some flowers, or a box of chocolates instead?"

"Things are different now, Alex." Was that regret in his voice?

"So Agent Scully is a better bedwarmer than I was?" He shifted uncomfortably, wishing that he had a free hand to adjust his clothing, but he held on to the phone.

"This has nothing to do with her. This is a global conspiracy we're dealing with, Alex, not an excuse for a date. If you want to help me, give me proof that I can use. If you want to fuck me--" Alex couldn't help his indrawn breath at the thought -- "get in line."

Alex depressed the disconnect button. "I fucked Scully, Mulder," he said into the dead metal. "I fucked her because you weren't there."

He started the car.

****

From his hotel room, he could see the Arc d'Triomphe. Paris was a perfect city in which to rid oneself of heartbreak, full of people looking for love or at least romance. He already had a job pending, a quick assassination that would put some money in his pocket, but he was still distracted by the thought of what he'd left behind in Washington.

The whole situation had forced him to re-evaluate heterosexuality as a sexual aid. It was clear that his masturbation fantasies were going to have an enlarged cast of characters, and that the average height was going to go down.

He'd have to pay them a visit sometime. It seemed probable that Scully would neglect to mention the naked Twister aspects of their short alliance, and that could prove very useful. Mulder *expected* Alex to lie, and also Alex was a guy and therefore ruled by sex. He might be a bit less forgiving with Scully. Her failings were supposed to be her rigidity and moral rectitude, not her ability to run liquid in the darkness with another man.

Everything happens for a purpose, he thought. The trick is making it work for you instead of for God.

Still, he wished that she'd just admitted the truth about her relationship with Mulder. It would have made things much easier.

Someday she'd beg to tell him about it, he vowed. There were many ways to make that happen.

He hardly knew where to begin.

END

Let me know whether you think M&amp;S were doing the nasty. I'm curious (yellow).

All is Truth -- Walt Whitman

O ME, man of slack faith so long! Standing aloof--denying portions so long; Only aware to-day of compact, all-diffused truth; Discovering to-day there is no lie, or form of lie, and can be none, but grows as inevitably upon itself as the truth does upon itself, Or as any law of the earth, or any natural production of the earth does.

(This is curious, and may not be realized immediately-- But it must be realized; I feel in myself that I represent falsehoods equally with the rest, And that the universe does.)

Where has fail'd a perfect return, indifferent of lies or the truth? Is it upon the ground, or in water or fire? or in the spirit of man? or in the meat and blood?

Meditating among liars, and retreating sternly into myself, I see that there are really no liars or lies after all, And that nothing fails its perfect return-- And that what are called lies are perfect returns, And that each thing exactly represents itself, and what has preceded it, And that the truth includes all, and is compact, just as much as space is compact, And that there is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth--but that all is truth without exception; And henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or am, And sing and laugh, and deny nothing.


End file.
